Welcome!

This body of work began sometime in the mid 1990's, as an experiment, seeing if I could adhere a dress to a canvas and create a painting over all the textures. "Dress painting" is a term I came up with to explain these when I simply couldn't think of anything better. Over the years they have evolved, with new elements of collage being added. Dress patterns, photographs, and embroidery all appear from time to time, as well as lino block prints, rubber stamps and gold leaf. I will use this space to explore the beginnings of this series, as well as showing my latest work. If the piece is available for sale you'll find the price at the bottom. Free shipping in the U.S. Contact me at kallencole@aol.com to purchase.

Monday, January 23, 2012

My name is Kathrine Allen-Coleman, and I am a serial brush abuser. These are not the grungiest brushes I could find, these are just a few currently sitting in the water bucket. You see, if you leave brushes in water, the wooden handles swell up. This causes the varnish to chip, and the little metal band that holds the bristles in will even stretch, unually just enough to make it wobble a bit. And, if you leave the brushes in water, the bristles will also swell, and permanently bend, and split into multiple directions. I have convinced myself that this makes for a nice if not somewhat unpredicatble line.

Now if you are working with acrylic paint and you choose not to leave your brushes in water, you'll get an even more irritating alternative. A brush that has all the softness and flexibility of a stick. This is because acrylic needs to stay wet, because it dries to a nice hard plastic.

Yes I could try harder to be a good brush steward. I could run in to the house and wash my brushes every hour or so, (yeah right.) I even try really hard to make this happen, I have that little conversation in my head whenever I find a "virgin-ish" brush, especially a little tiny one that still has a point. "I will clean this, just use it for this little bit, and then clean it." Plop, into the water bucket, and I find it in a week or so. Dead as a doornail, or at least all bent to one side.

Now my husband, Scott, is a watercolor painter. And watercolorists are borderline fanatical about their brushes. They buy these $50 brushes made of very small animals, and treat them very kindly. The first time I met Scott (he was teaching a watercolor workshop in Southern France) he scolded me for leaving my brushes soaking in water beside me as I painted. I couldn't bear to tell him that not only are these brushes sitting in water, but about 6000 miles away in my studio at home, there are other brushes sitting in water too. They had developed a rather fetid odor by the time I returned home, in case you wanted that information.

There really is no point to this, no lesson to learn. I deal with this handicap by buying packs of brushes, the crappy kind. Just one step above those horrible plastic things they put in paint by numbers kits. (What kind of cosmic joke is that anyway?) And if I need a reliable little point, I look for a good one, sacrafice it to the water jug and move on.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Holy smokes, here she goes again. Kathrine is half cocked and running around chasing rainbows, and mail delivery trucks, her tail, and well, you get the idea! If you've been reading this blog for any time at all you know that I've been working on a bunch of new pieces for my dress painting series. I have three biggies, just on-the-brink of being done. They are each 24" wide by 56" high.

But, (and this is a big one) along the way these little bitties came up...

Isn't interesting what happens when you aren't really paying attention? These little pieces are all 4" square. They are all little original mixed media pieces, each one is one of a kind, on small stretched canvases. And the best part of these is how versatile they are, here is some of the same group rearranged in a different setting...

So, as these are all little bits, or fragments of the big dresses I've been working on, I've decided to call this group (Elle)ements. I'm just warming up a new blog for them, and they are already on the Spring Gallery web site. You can see them all here!http://thespringgallery.com/section/281207_elle_ements.html

I have a mere 45 available to start, but boxes of new canvases on the way. They are all $25 each, shipping to anywhere in the US will be $6 whether you buy one or one hundred.

These will be coming with me on the road to shows, but I'd also like to start finding some wholesale opportunities. If you have any bright ideas, please pass them along. That's it for now, time to get busy!

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About Me

I have two blogs which I try to tend to regularly, Dresspaintings, and (Elle)ements. The dresspaintings are "the big girls" multi paneled mixed media paintings, and the (Elle)ements are little elements of the big pieces. 4" square canvases containing fragments and bits of stories from "the big girls." I hope you enjoy them all!